The Ghost and The Haunted Mansion: A Haunted Bookshop Mystery

nice thing there,” I told Jack when we reached the building’s small, tiled lobby.
    He shrugged it off. “Had to stash the kid somewhere. I knew somebody sent that burglar. I figured whoever wanted that junk was going to come back for it again.”
    “Do you think that burglar had the mother’s key, Jack?”
    He nodded.
    “Well, I’d like to know where J. J.’s mother got that dagger with the Todd Mansion design on its hilt. Is it just some random purchase? Or did someone give it to her? And who are these ‘people’ that J. J. mentioned, the ones supposedly helping his mom with her new occult powers? Did they give her the dagger? The boyfriend is bound to know more.”
    Jack folded his arms and gazed down at me. “So what’s your next step?”
    “We go to the Broadway jewelry store and find out if anyone knows Frankie Papps.”
    With a single finger Jack pushed back the brim of his fedora. Then he rested an arm on the wall near my head. “It’s pretty late, honey. Store’s probably closing up by now. How about you and I go back to my place and”—he winked—“wait till morning.”
    I raised an eyebrow. “Is that what your big plans were with that well-endowed luncheonette girl?”
    “Aw, baby, that was a long time ago . . . before I met you.”
    “Aw, Jack. Are you going soft on me?”
    “Naw, sweetheart.” He smiled. “Must be your imagination.”
    Maybe this was just a dream, but Jack sure felt real, standing close, leaning closer, until I felt a hard tug on my arm.
    What the . . . ?
    Another tug.
    “Mom!”
    A child’s voice. A boy was calling for his mother. Was it J. J. calling?
    “Mooooom!”
    I opened my eyes. My son was standing next to my bed.
    “Get up, Mom!”
    “Spencer?”
    “You have to drive me to the bus by nine, remember? I’m going to camp today!”

CHAPTER 12
     
    Limbo
     
    After that nothing happened for three days. Nobody slugged me or shot at me or called me up on the phone and warned me to keep my nose clean. Nobody hired me to find the wandering daughter, the erring wife, the lost pearl necklace, or the missing will. I just sat there and looked at the wall.
    —Philip Marlow in The Long Goodbye , Raymond Chandler, 1953
     
     
     
     
    THAT MORNING’S EVENTS blew me around like an Atlantic gale. After getting Spencer packed off to camp, I drove back to the store to find a waiting sales rep from a new regional publisher. I’d no sooner said goodbye to him than a female customer—one I hadn’t seen in months—began loudly complaining about the Zara Underwood display. After finally calming her down, a bestselling author dropped in unexpectedly to sign all of her stock and I had to run to Cooper Family Bakery to pick up refreshments for the Tea and Sympathy book club—a local group of working women who met during lunch breaks to discuss British mysteries. Next a cluster of touring seniors descended on me with dozens of questions about our events schedule while a rather large group of men I’d never seen before lined up to buy Bang, Bang Baby.
    All of that took place amid the typical increased traffic Sadie and I handled this time of year of young people in search of beach books, and loyal customers wanting advice for vacation reading.
    My few minutes of free time I used to search the Internet for any image matches on the Todd Mansion pentagram. Unfortunately, I could find nothing that even came close to matching the unique design.
    By seven o’clock, Sadie was more than ready for her dinner date with Bud and I was holding the literary fort with Bonnie Franzetti and our new part-timer, Dilbert Randall, a St. Francis history major with brown wavy hair, an easygoing smile, and glasses of the small, round, Harry Potter variety.
    As far as I could tell, Dilbert’s entire wardrobe consisted of worn blue jeans, Hush Puppies, and pastel-colored Izod shirts. His passion for historical mysteries, on the other hand, ranged from Lynda S. Robinson’s lively Egyptian mysteries—set in the time of Tutankhamun—to Ellis Peters’s twelfth-century Brother Cadfael chronicles and the Victorian cases of Anne Perry’s Inspector Thomas Pitt.
    More than once during my crazy-busy workday it occurred to me that Jack Shepard hadn’t said boo to me. But then I remembered what the ghost had told me the day before in my car—that I’d been moving too fast to hear him—and I began to think the communication problem was mine.
    I was just about ready to take a short break and